Lofty adventures

Friday

Aug 31, 2007 at 12:01 AMAug 31, 2007 at 12:06 AM

Hot-air balloon pilots ride the wind for a view of the world from on high.

Philip Anselmo

CANANDAIGUA — As the sun sinks beneath the shrub line and the car headlights flicker on along the Gorham country roads, the wicker basket of the hot air balloon skids past a puddle-sized pond and tips its passengers into an unkempt farmer’s field full of crickets.
Success.
Pilot Lee Teitsworth warned of the two types of landing earlier in the evening. There’s the calm drop of the basket with a few gentle hops and an upright stop: the photogenic finish. Then there’s the windy, “rip out” or “highway” landing, when the basket — often urged on by a gutsy gust — is dragged to a halt and the passengers topple onto the other, the balloon by then on its side.
Either way, the flight ends with a champagne toast and an almost immediate melancholy at being stuck back on the ground.
It all started a couple hours earlier on a plot of grass off Lakeshore Drive in Canandaigua with the guys from Liberty Balloon Company, their trucks and 350 pounds of nylon.
Twenty-four-year-old newlywed Lee Teitsworth was to pilot one of the balloons. His father, Carroll, would take the other. Lee’s brother, Lance, and a friend, who goes by J, would head up the chase crew — the landside bunch who follow the flight in pickups and trailers, guide the landing, then help pack everything back up.
First, they set up the basket and attach the propane fuel, then inflate the balloon with a high-powered fan.
The balloon is some 68 feet tall, ready to go.
Before take-off, Lee says explains that the balloon goes where the wind beckons it. This night, it’s west, and south.
“The beauty of ballooning is once you take off, all the noise and commotion is gone — it’s just peaceful and calm,” says Lee. “You’re just floating with the wind like a bubble, like a toy balloon. Most of the time, you don’t even feel the wind on your face.”
A crowd mills about the launch site as the balloons lift off and head for Canandaigua Lake, waving hello or goodbye. Lee shouts back through a smile. More hands go up in response.
The rippled waters drift past underneath. Boats, docks, homes, dogs, people, cars.
Lee brings the balloon down, and glides across the lake near shore, a few feet over the water. Boaters and beach-bathers wave, and Lee leans over the basket to wave back.
He adds more propane, and powers the ballooon up to gently “kiss” his dad’s balloon — nylon on nylon.
Once the lake is cleared, the shimmer of golden sun on the waves yields to the geometry of farmed fields and planned housing. Cars pull to the side of the street to watch the balloonists. A buck darts through the fields, freaked out by the looming shadows.
During the day, Lee works as a loan officer for a mortgage broker. “That could be more rewarding,” he says of his day job, “but this is more fun.”
The basket dips into tidy rows of corn stalks, skimming the buds within reach of the ears, but the flames lift the balloon back up — just in time, it seems — to clear the trees at the edge of the farm. Lee leans out and snags a few leaves as he passes.
The pilot doesn’t have much control over where the balloon goes, he says. The wind decides the route and all you can do is lift or duck through the currents to change direction.
“It’s like a writer deciding to write a sonnet,” says Lee. “You adapt to the challenge of having limited control.”
What has since become a family affair started 30 years ago, when U.S. Navy airplane pilot Carroll Teitsworth said goodbye to wings and started full time as a balloonist. Since then, both his sons, Lee and Lance, his wife and one of his daughters joined ranks and formed the Liberty Balloon Company. Carroll’s other daughter, and her husband, also balloonists, fly out of Virginia.
Lee offers these bits of biography as he squeezes the propane trigger and talks positioning on the radio with the chase crew as the balloon sets its sights on a fine patch of empty farmland to touch down. Carroll’s balloon drifts off a few fields away and lands upright to the delight of spectators, with cameras and questions.
J grabs the ropes of Lee’s balloon and guides it around the pond before they come to the “rip stop.”
Dozens of crickets hop into the folds of the deflated balloon as Lee and J roll it back up and stuff it into a canvas sack, ready for the next run.
The green of the ground lacks the distant promise it held while afloat. Earthbound, it all seems pedestrian again.
Nothing left to do but celebrate the success.
Ballooning was the first form of flight, says Lee as a prelude to the champagne toast: The Montgolfier brothers invented this first form of flight around 1783, in France.
It was a paper balloon, a wooden platform and a fire fed with rubber shoe soles and pig dung, he says. They thought it was the smelly smoke that propelled the craft, not heat. Their paper balloon soared nonetheless.
The smelly, smoky craft took its first human passengers into the country to its virgin public. Unfortunately, that public was not yet ready for its spectacle. The scared peasants formed a mob and attacked the landed craft with pitchforks, tearing it to shreds, says Lee.
Bound and circled by a raging mob, the pilots offered their only defense: a bottle of champagne, which immediately proved the floating creatures were, in fact, Frenchmen and not aliens.
So, to this day, every balloon flight ends with just such a champagne toast. This night, they celebrate with the farmer whose field they landed in, gathered around his barn. The cups reads: “Friendly Landowner, Calm Winds, Safe Landing.”
Cheers.
Philip Anselmo can be reached at (585) 394-0770, Ext. 322, or at panselmo@mpnewspapers.com.

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